Edwin Land Quotes

If you think about it enough to have a really articulate answer, you're not doing it right. That's how I feel about art. If your thought process could take you to knowing exactly what you're doing and why, there would be no point in making the art. It would become like propaganda. It's more nebulous than that.

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

First thought is best in Art, second in other matters.

I find that the quest to be perfect and make perfect music is like a black whole. I realize that you can come with the intention to capture a vibe and use a formula, but you have to accept that most of the time its not going to be what you envisioned and you might manifest something better. I think that's been the hardest thing to wrap my head around that most ideas we go for ends up sounding different. I think art in general should be about enjoying the process and the experience. All that matters is if you feel the music and it captures the element your going for.

Art does not come from thinking but from responding.

I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.

A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image.

I've always felt that there's a point where a piece seems to be alive, that is, living. And that's the point where I know the composition is finished.

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.

You don't see artists sitting around a lot, talking about ideology. They find out what they believe, and what they're doing, by doing it.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

Fine artists reflect, and then they act. Fashion photographers - we act, and then we reflect.

Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until I paint it, so it's almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can't help but know what he's going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation.

Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.

There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you've got it, you've got it. When you haven't, you begin again. All the rest is humbug.

I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.

An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.

What matters in art is not thinking but making.

Don't think about making art.

Half of art is accident, but there is no accident without free experiment.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.